I remember playing No Man's Sky at launch and despite all its flaws, I really liked how it handled discovering different languages and wondered what a game might look like with that as a central concept. Chants of Senaar delivers a very memorable experience based on this premise and every moment of discovering the languages of the game was a joy. From the symbolic depictions of words, to the different representations of concepts between cultures and the ways you stumble upon a new word's meaning, this game was crafted with a lot of care and attention to detail and it really shines through.
The music is great and the game is beautiful, although I'm not sure about the hatching for the art style. I played the whole game with it off and switched back a few times but am firmly on the side that no hatching looks a lot better. This game is pretty close to a 9/10 for me but a couple of things held it back. Some locations are way too far apart. In the 2nd area especially while I was still figuring things out, I was going back and forth between a few places and was moving for minutes and minutes just to go check something again. On top of that, the movement is a bit slow and janky - the framing of each shot and the trigger locations for the camera to move exacerbated this. I would find myself spam clicking the edge of the screen since there was only a sliver of road ahead of me to move to. This also carries over to the chase and stealth sequences which weren't amazing but the checkpoints were the most forgiving I've ever seen so that helped assuage any problems there.
Discovering each language overshadowed all of the traditional point and click puzzles, much to the game's benefit. I think I might have a problem with the point and click genre in general as it can often feel like the illusion of a puzzle and a lot of busy work. I think linearity is the main culprit for this feeling and that's why the translation is handled so well. You often have multiple threads to work on and multiple clues to look at simultaneously. Some of the main tasks to progress through areas veered a bit on the wrong side of this as it felt like I was being funnelled through a linear path to get the items I needed. To be clear, I'm not bashing linearity, but I think it can sometimes remove the need for player thought and replace curiosity-driven discoveries. In fairness though, I would say the general puzzles in the game are neutral at worst, although a couple did fall into the category that I hate: quick and easy to think of the solution, no mechanical difficulty to execute the solution but really slow to execute the solution. Thankfully these issues were largely at the periphery of what was a really special game to play. I loved the full ending and can definitely recommend the game. (Also I liked that nothing was too hard that it needed a guide).
The music is great and the game is beautiful, although I'm not sure about the hatching for the art style. I played the whole game with it off and switched back a few times but am firmly on the side that no hatching looks a lot better. This game is pretty close to a 9/10 for me but a couple of things held it back. Some locations are way too far apart. In the 2nd area especially while I was still figuring things out, I was going back and forth between a few places and was moving for minutes and minutes just to go check something again. On top of that, the movement is a bit slow and janky - the framing of each shot and the trigger locations for the camera to move exacerbated this. I would find myself spam clicking the edge of the screen since there was only a sliver of road ahead of me to move to. This also carries over to the chase and stealth sequences which weren't amazing but the checkpoints were the most forgiving I've ever seen so that helped assuage any problems there.
Discovering each language overshadowed all of the traditional point and click puzzles, much to the game's benefit. I think I might have a problem with the point and click genre in general as it can often feel like the illusion of a puzzle and a lot of busy work. I think linearity is the main culprit for this feeling and that's why the translation is handled so well. You often have multiple threads to work on and multiple clues to look at simultaneously. Some of the main tasks to progress through areas veered a bit on the wrong side of this as it felt like I was being funnelled through a linear path to get the items I needed. To be clear, I'm not bashing linearity, but I think it can sometimes remove the need for player thought and replace curiosity-driven discoveries. In fairness though, I would say the general puzzles in the game are neutral at worst, although a couple did fall into the category that I hate: quick and easy to think of the solution, no mechanical difficulty to execute the solution but really slow to execute the solution. Thankfully these issues were largely at the periphery of what was a really special game to play. I loved the full ending and can definitely recommend the game. (Also I liked that nothing was too hard that it needed a guide).